The agrarian question in Russia is of tremendous importance at the
present time. It is common knowledge that this question has been given
front-rank prominence, not only by the broad masses of the people, but also
by the government.

Historically, the movement of 1905 was characterised precisely by the
fact that the vast majority of the population in Russia, namely, the
peasantry, made the agrarian question a key issue. Both the
liberal-bourgeois party and the workers’ party took this fact into
consideration in their respective programmes. On the other hand, when the
government, in its June Third regime, brought about an alliance between the
landlords and the upper stratum of the bourgeoisie, it made the agrarian
question the pivot of its policy (the forcible destruction of communal
landownership and the conversion of allotment land into private property,
mainly in the homestead system).

What is the economic essence of the agrarian question in Russia? It is
the reorganisation of Russia on bourgeois-democratic lines. Russia has
become a capitalist, bourgeois country, but the system of landownership in
this country has to a very large degree remained feudal, as regards both
landlordism and peasant allotment ownership. In very many cases the system
of land economy has remained feudal: labour service and the corvée,
under which the semi ruined, pauperised, and starving petty proprietors
rent land, grassland and pastures and borrow money from the landlords, with
the obligation to repay the debt by working on the “squire’s” land.

The more feudalist rural Rus lags behind
industrial, commercial, capitalist Russia, the more complete will be
the inevitable break-up of the ancient, feudalist system of landownership,
both landlordism and allotment ownership.

The landlords tried to effect this break-up in the land lord fashion,
to suit the interests of the landlords, retaining their own landed estates,
and helping the kulaks to grab the peasants’ land. The majority of the
peasants tried to do this in peasant fashion, to suit the interests of the
peasants.

In either case the reform remains bourgeois in character. In
his Poverty of Philosophy, in Capital, and in
Theories of Surplus-Value, Marx amply proved that the
bourgeois economists often demanded the nationalisation
of the land, i.e., the conversion of all land into public property, and
that this measure was a fully bourgeois measure. Capitalism will
develop more widely, more freely and more quickly from such a measure. This
measure is very progressive and very democratic. It will do away completely
with serfdom, will break the monopoly in land, and will abolish
absolute rent (the existence of which the liquidator P. Maslov,
trailing in the wake of bourgeois scholars, erroneously denies). It will
speed up the development of the productive forces in agriculture and purge
the class movement among the wage-workers.

But, we repeat, this is a bourgeois-democratic measure. Like
Mr. V—dimov in Smelaya Mysl, the Left Narodniks persist in
calling the bourgeois nationalisation of the land
“socialisation” and persistently ignore Marx’s comprehensive
explanations of what nationalisation of land under capitalism implies.

The Left Narodniks persist in reiterating the purely bourgeois theory
of “labour economy” and its development under “socialisation”, whereas,
in fact, with the nationalisation of the land, it is capitalist
landownership in its purest form, free of feudalism, that will inevitably
develop more widely and quickly.

The catchword of “socialisation of the land” merely denotes the Left
Narodniks’ utter failure to grasp the principles of Marx’s political
economy, and the fact that they are going over (stealthily, by fits and
starts, and often unconsciously) to the side of bourgeois political
economy.

Marx advised class-conscious workers, while forming a clear idea of the
bourgeois character of all agrarian reforms under capitalism (including the
nationalisation of the land), to support bourgeois-democratic reforms as
against the feudalists and serfdom. But Marxists cannot confuse bourgeois
measures with socialism.